31 May

/ by Ton

Now the real download craze is over we’ve checked some of the statistics. For example, in the two days we offered the movie on blender.org it was downloaded over 53k times. I had to remove the links because our servers were smoking.

I didn’t get all stats yet from the other mirrors, but the confirmed numbers (including torrent) are 533k now. Might be in reality a million though, our download page alone attracted daily over 150k pageviews for almost a week.

Further; Jan Morgenstern has finished the audiotrack without voices, for your karaoke and dubbing pleasure, available under the CC Attribution 2.5 license:

We’ve already been contacted by an Italian TV production studio interested to do the Italian dubbed version. Just a note; you can just do this without asking permission, fits perfectly in the CC license!

50 Responses to “Half a million downloads… and the ED Karaoke version!”

Okay, this AC3 file wasn’t exactly targeted for a public release… anyway, now it’s there, so I better quickly explain how you can make use of it before I get flamed into oblivion for bringing you the next installment of “guess the codec”.

You’ll need to split this up into a format you can use in your favourite sample editor, HD recording program or DAW. This is quite easy with mplayer (provided that you have compiled in support for liba52), and should work in similar ways with all apps that can play AC3 files directly.

This will write out a stereo version in WAV format, which might be what most people want for dubbing:

mplayer -channels 2 -ao pcm:file=ed-stereo.wav ED-ME-5.1-DVD.ac3

This will give you a 6-channel 5.1 WAV file, which can be opened and further split into its components in Audacity:

mplayer -channels 6 -ao pcm:file=ed-51.wav ED-ME-5.1-DVD.ac3

There’s a sync beep on all channels, placed 2 seconds before the first frame of the movie.

If you don’t intend to play around with the 5.1 mix anyway, I have yet a better idea, though: ignore the AC3 file for now, we’ll publish the same mix in a more suitable format (and without the lossy compression of AC3) soon.

Only the isolated score, as put up in another post, has a by-nc-nd license. This mix is Attribution only.

carlinhos said on 1 Jun, 2006:

Everything sounds nice, but I still have not received my DVD, which I have ordered on 23rd of August 2005. The Blender shop first sent the DVD to an address where I lived until 2003 (!). They even didn’t ask for the address, they just took the address from the database (I have ordered years ago a book and a CD from the shop). Two weeks ago the Blender shop informed me about the fact, that the DVD was sent back, but the waited another 3 or 4 days to send it again to my new address. Since that another week has gone and I still haven’t received the DVD, even if I have been promised to get the DVD per priority.
Another thing: I have just seen the credits of ED and could not find my name. Not that I am totally keen on reading my name at the end of the film, but it was a promise to everybody, who ordered the DVD before 1st of September.
I am really disappointed about all that and cannot really look forward to see ED. Actually the Blender shop should give the money back.

carlinhos: I’d suggest contacting ton (at) blender.org to get it sorted out. There has been problems with slow postal services already, Andy and Jan who live next door in Germany had to wait over a week for their DVDs to be delivered. I don’t have anything to do with the e-shop myself, but I’m very sorry that you’ve had this experience, and hope you can get your DVD soon.

Carlinhos, I couldn’t find my name in the credits either, and I got the only borked DVD copy to the Ton’s knowledge. Maybe we have some kind of similar luck. Don’t worry about it taking rediculously long. The same thing happened to a lot of people.

Jan, I was under the assumption from the start that something like this would be out if not included on the discs. I’m excited about dubbing it with friends of mine to make it hillarious, or “fixing” the dialogue to what we think it should be assuming we’ve deciphered the plot correctly.

Thanks.

Paolo said on 1 Jun, 2006:

Congratulations

Svenn said on 1 Jun, 2006:

When i try either of the links from KidB i get the same message:

“Error in ../logs/downloadcount.log on line 2071.
./topdir/download.blender.org/ED/DVD2/production/lib/scripts/walktest2.blend is already defined.”

Why? Can anyone fix it?

Myster_EE said on 1 Jun, 2006:

BTW, On the Download page, the “DVD Image: Videos Only” Part 5 bittorrent downlaod link points to Part 4….

I got the french mirror more or less tuned (against apache-killing leeching).
I top out between 40 and 80Mbs (peaks at 95)
(I believe another French mirror is being set up too, both on a 20Gb network connected to one of europes biggest perring points)
I didn’t stats downloads yet, will give news when possible.

Cheers !

Auteuro said on 3 Jun, 2006:

Thank you, Jan!

Oooooooh…the chance to do our own voice dubs… Well, to those who didn’t like the voice characterizations, now’s your chance!

Just remember: try to keep it clean folks, or be sure to put in proper warnings…remember the CHILDREN!!! :p

Jason Ekstrand said on 3 Jun, 2006:

I’m having trouble with video.blendertestbuilds.de:

Could not open file ../logs/downloadcount.log for writing. Make sure PHP has write permission to this file.

Joeri said on 4 Jun, 2006:

“Share-alike protects you (and us!) from that when you release content like this, by ensuring that you yourself will still have the freedom to re-use any derivative works produced.”

Would this mean that if I reuse a texture from ED that the whole movie I made would (also) be for the foundation to use?
If so, then I’m not going to contribute any of my textures anymore.
I can’t, because my clients don’t want the project I do for them to belong to the blender foundation just because I gave one of my textures to the foundation.

fz said on 4 Jun, 2006:

Can you upload a new version of the dvd part rar 2, 3, 4 and 5 ? because they are corrupted.

“I don’t believe *that* is what the makers of it would like to see, nor that it serves the interests of the wider community for that to be possible.”

Well, if that’s not what we would like to see, then we would have used a share-alike license. :) Since we didn’t, one can only assume that we’re perfectly happy with anyone using the content in whatever way they like – truly free. What we made, the original, is free to all and nobody can take that away.

FranzRogar said on 4 Jun, 2006:

fz: I’ve downloaded them and they’re correct. Try with WinRAR.

fz said on 4 Jun, 2006:

FranzRogar : Thanks a lot it works with WinRAR, there was some kind of bug with 7zip.

interesting points you bring up- I’m half in agreement- I like the gpl license that e.g. blender uses; and I can see how that argument applies to the film assets; for instance, if someone creates an improvement to a character rig that allows squash n stretch, more facial expression, or optimizes a model to render faster- i.e. about the ‘source’ of the movie.
On the other hand, I don’t think proprietary licensed forks automatically render the original code or the open derivatives of it ‘irrelevant’- in some ways, the proprietary versions are irrelevant, since they get removed from the open exchange of ideas.
In the case of the film itself, it’s even nebulous to say what an improvement is; taste is the biggest factor in assessing here (for example, which is better: the first “version” of starwars or the “improved versions” that came later? )
I think it can be argued in many ways. We chose this license this time around, but that doesn’t mean we can’t re-release the movie or the assets under a different license (e.g. sharealike) later on- So I’m not sure we lost anything by making a choice. Seeing as how this is a new venture for us, and perhaps in general, it will be also interesting to view it as an experiment, and see what the results of licensing this way are for a movie+assets, as opposed to a program+souce code.

The chosen license offers the most freedom to all users, because not allowing something would already limit its usage. Open movie we wanted, and open movie we got. Now I get the feeling that some people are finding it too open?

If you feel you need to ‘give back’ to the community / blender / orange you could always buy or preorder the DVD.

Jason Ekstrand said on 6 Jun, 2006:

The xseed.bowiestate.edu/ED/production folder is far fome the complete production set. Could someone please fix this? It would also be nice if you would provide the entire production set as one easy tar.bz2 file (or tar.gz if you prefer) to make it easier to download.

Jason Ekstrand:
I think you are best off buying the dvd’s.
Currently all gracious providers are under heavy download stress.

mercury_merlin:
“which would guarantee freedom for future derivatives as well.”

In my head it went: Aha! “What if” Pixar made a better version of this movie, they should give all the assets back to us indeed!
The whole idea of copyleft is based on the idea of the original getting obsolete… I would like to see that happen yet actualy.

As to the ‘must’ of giving the changes back might stop people from making the changes. “What if” some germans want to dub the movie but don’t have bandwidth to let everybody download the german version? This would stop them from being creative and learning how to dub, that would be a real shame I think.

Poetsoul said on 7 Jun, 2006:

One can see the inspiration and influence of Stalker (Andrei Tarkovsky 1979) in this video; I thought it was a nice touch to include the signature Stalker image of water over ruined tiles in the movie’s title screen. Shouldn’t we see the soviet movie credited elsewhere on the page or in the credits?

Truly amazing! I’ve watched Elephants Dream 4 times already and will be emailing many friends to encourage them to experience it as well.
Thanks for bring Elephants Dream into being. I can’t wait to see more.
Marc

nabster said on 11 Jun, 2006:

1280×720 (720p high-definition) version please!

I would like to request a version in 720p resolution (1280×720). A lot of ‘high-defintion’ consumer living-room screens only display as high as 720p. This resolution is greater than the your 1024 size, and my processor isn’t fast enough to decode the 1920 size.

I have unsucessfully tried to convert the 1920 version into 1280×720 using gtranscode, konverter and divx converter, but that’s just my poor programming skills!

Thanks, Nabster

DwarvenFury said on 11 Jun, 2006:

nabster: The DVD includes a 1280×720 resolution HD version, so if you have the DVD you can get it in the “HD” section of the NTSC disc. (If you don’t have it, though, maybe somebody could host it, or maybe the Orange team will upload it.)

Niels said on 12 Jun, 2006:

How come this movie can’t be downloaded in a free format like ogg? It’s a bit odd that the rest of the project is opensource and creative commons, but the released files are some of the most restricted formats…

Will this super cool film be avaible in a free format?

steijn said on 16 Jun, 2006:

I downoaded the torrent of the 1024 version of the movie.. But it won’t play. Anyone knows what to do?

DwarvenFury said on 16 Jun, 2006:

steijn: You probably need to download a video player that will play the file. I would recommend using VLC, (http://www.videolan.org/) which should play the file “out of the box”. Hope that helps.